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I don’t know if AI is a pressing threat but the slow march towards general intelligence is actually pretty incredible to witness. A year ago I would have found

I don’t know if AI is a pressing threat but the slow march towards general intelligence is actually pretty incredible to witness. A year ago I would have found it hard to believe something like chatGPT could exist in my lifetime, now it’s rather easy to visualize what it’s doing in that “word predictor” as something very close to abstractions similar to what humans do. It feels like all that needs to happen at this point is the spontaneous eruption of a meta hypervisor that would “think” about what those abstractions are and boom you have consciousness. All of it doesn’t seem impossible anymore. After all, humans evolved a brain under the same physical universal constraints and with the same set of initial building blocks.

xcode42 3y ago
While I agree that ChatGPT is surprisingly impressive, I think you might be underestimating what's still missing. For starters, what you describe as "the spontaneous eruption of a meta hypervisor that would “think” " is such a hard problem that they literally call it the "Hard problem of consciousness" and is debatably a much harder problem than what we've already solved. Secondly, it is very much an open question whether having this "conscience" would solve the arbitrary problem/context/environment abstraction generation, since it doesn't seem to me that that is the way our own brains/conscience work. I(my conscious mind) don't generate the abstractions that allow me to solve problems, I look at problems and the "right way to look at the problem to better solve it" just kind of "clicks"/pops into my head as an idea, so it is most likely being handled by some algorithm in the background I'm not aware off. And that's not even mentioning that as far as I am aware(someone who is more uptodate with the most recent AI advancements correct me if I'm wrong) but I don't think learning on-the-go processing new input data as it comes along without screwing up/forgetting/overffiting your previous learning is a solved a problem. ChatGPT still needed to be explicitly and manually trained from a large dataset right? It isn't continuously learning, right?

xcode42 3y ago

While I agree that ChatGPT is surprisingly impressive, I think you might be underestimating what's still missing. For starters, what you describe as "the spontaneous eruption of a meta hypervisor that would “think” " is such a hard problem that they literally call it the "Hard problem of consciousness" and is debatably a much harder problem than what we've already solved. Secondly, it is very much an open question whether having this "conscience" would solve the arbitrary problem/context/environment abstraction generation, since it doesn't seem to me that that is the way our own brains/conscience work. I(my conscious mind) don't generate the abstractions that allow me to solve problems, I look at problems and the "right way to look at the problem to better solve it" just kind of "clicks"/pops into my head as an idea, so it is most likely being handled by some algorithm in the background I'm not aware off. And that's not even mentioning that as far as I am aware(someone who is more uptodate with the most recent AI advancements correct me if I'm wrong) but I don't think learning on-the-go processing new input data as it comes along without screwing up/forgetting/overffiting your previous learning is a solved a problem. ChatGPT still needed to be explicitly and manually trained from a large dataset right? It isn't continuously learning, right?